Ghost Ranch updates Southwestern cuisine
Aug. 27.
“That is literally what I wrote down when I was 19 years old.”
Chamberlin grew up in south Tempe at a time when chefs like John Sedlar and Vincent Guerithault were riding a wave of popularity built on a saucy, spicy, big-plate vision of Southwestern cuisine that burned hot on the national stage with the heat of a truckload of chiles and then inexplicably flamed out.
“All of a sudden, it just vanished,” Chamberlin says. “I’m like, what happened?” Now, sitting in the dining room of a bright restaurant bathed in desert hues, back in the heart of the neighborhood where he once set that goal, Chamberlin prepares to launch his version of the beloved cuisine of his childhood.
Ghost Ranch, one of the Valley’s most anticipated chef-owned restaurants of 2018, is a refreshed, modern take he hopes will revitalize a style of food that
has fallen by the wayside.
The state of Southwestern cuisine? “It’s almost a dead cuisine,” Chamberlin says. “You Google ‘Southwestern restaurants in Arizona’ and Z’Tejas is the only thing that comes up.”
It might be more a matter of broader trends than a specific rebuke of a style that had its heyday in the late 1980s and early ’90s. In this hyper-local culinary age — when we define cuisines not by countries but by regions, cities and even neighborhoods — a genre of food that draws influences from a quarter of the United States and parts of Mexico can feel uncomfortably broad.
But Chamberlin, who worked under Sedlar early in his kitchen career, never fell out of love with Southwestern food. True to the style, rather than pinpointing a dot on the map to represent, he’s casting his net far and wide.
“I said, from Baja to Texas and from Colorado down to Mexico is where we want to pull from. That’s what the scope of this is.”
The look of Ghost Ranch, however, is New Mexico all over.
New Mexico to south Tempe
Named for the New Mexico ranch that served as home and muse to Georgia O’Keeffe, Ghost Ranch is meant to evoke the feel of its namesake, which Chamberlin acknowledges is no easy task. For that job, he tapped again artist Gennaro Garcia, whose restaurant design projects include Chamberlin’s most recent launch, Taco Chelo.
“I showed (Garcia) a picture of an old abandoned adobe building from New Mexico with a blue door, and I’m like, how do we make this?” Chamberlin says. “But also, we’re in a strip mall, and how do we make something where it
Ghost Ranch
Monday, Aug. 27. 1006 E. Warner Road, Tempe. 480-474-4328, ghostranchaz.com.
doesn’t feel fake? How do we make something relevant that is also cool and modern?”
The space has the crisp and thoughtful design that typifies Garcia’s work. But unlike the brash, urban feel of Taco Chelo, Ghost Ranch is more open and serene, a painted desert landscape with walls that evoke textured adobe, a bare wood ceiling done in herringbone-patterned latillas, and wrought-iron light fixtures inspired by the New Mexico flag.
“(Chamberlin) has been traveling to New Mexico and bringing me these ideas, (saying) ‘I want it to feel like you are in this place.’ It’s similar to the menu. It’s something old that is coming back, but in a more modern way,” Garcia
explains.
Indeed, Ghost Ranch is the antithesis of the dark, cave-like Southwestern restaurants of old, and not just when it comes to the decor.
Culinary cousins from Mexico
Chamberlin doesn’t like to throw on his whites once a month and pretend. Though he still has the chops, he’s less of a chef and more of a restaurateur these days, running Phoenix Public Market Cafe, opening Tempe Public Market Cafe in January and recently selling St. Francis in central Phoenix.
His brothers in arms, designing the menu to his vision and running the kitchen on a day-to-day basis, are cousins Rene Andrade and Roberto Centeno. Andrade is the “regional chef; Centeno is the chef de cuisine.
Andrade came up with Matt Carter at The Mission and The House Brasserie, but spent the last six years working for Beau MacMillan at Elements, most recently as his PM sous chef. Andrade brought Centeno in to work with him at Elements, and the duo connected with Chamberlin through Garcia, a friend in common and fellow countryman.
Andrade and Centeno hail from Nogales, the Mexican border town an hour south of Tucson. After a stretch working with Asian-influenced fine dining, the pair seem to relish putting their mark on a cuisine that is heavily influenced by the history of their home.
“We’re trying to do Southwest but not big, big platters. Something more refined. Not upscale, but something more clean,” Andrade says.
“Nowadays,” Centeno adds, “I feel like the whole Mexican concept is evolving, and rather than going forward, we’re going backwards. People are starting to use ingredients that they were using 100, 150 years ago. All of that super old school stuff is coming back with a modern touch.”
There’s a certain poetry to a pair of young chefs from Mexico offering a fresh take on an American fusion cuisine. It’s as though their ancestral foods got a little overly brash and portly during a two-decade sojourn through the States, and they now have the opportunity to keep the good while trimming away some of the excess weight.
“That’s our focus, not just getting one dish and you’re done after the chips and salsa,” Andrade says. “We want people to go through the whole experience.”
They describe maintaining the spirit and flavors of the cuisine, but losing the heft that comes courtesy of seven sauces, a giant pile of rice and beans, and a hefty helping of melted cheese.
“You can get all the potential from every single ingredient,” Centeno says. “Don’t play with it too much, just keep it simple and do it the right way.”
The right way, in their estimation, is nothing like the Southwestern fare of yesteryear.
‘Modern Southwest Cuisine’
The menu at Ghost Ranch — lunch and dinner during the week, plus brunch on the weekends — sports plenty of familiar Southwest favorites like tacos, enchiladas, a green chile burger and a cowboy steak.
But in the late ‘80s, you would have been hard-pressed to find a dish in a Southwestern restaurant like the ceviche, taut shrimp in a verdant lime-cilantro aguachile with orange, avocado and thick, crisp tostadas.
Salads aren’t laden with black beans and tortilla strips, but light affairs built on stellar produce and punchy citrus dressings that don’t try to outduel the fruit’s natural sweetness.
Pumpkin soup — a blend of varieties depending on what’s available —
is minimal, unsweetened and unadulterated with heavy seasoning. But it’s silky and thick and studded with cubes of roasted squash, a dusting of fresh herbs and little fried balls of masa that almost play like corn pops.
When the enchiladas arrive, they’re a long way from the soupy affairs of yore. Chile Colorado is wrapped in corn tortillas fried to a crisp. On top, a restrained touch of melted Oaxaca cheese and a light dusting of cotija take a backseat to a crisp, fresh jumble of shaved cabbage, radish and Fresno chiles. And the red sauce, made from prized Chimayo chiles, isn’t offered in swimming-pool portions, but judiciously applied, replacing pure volume with a smoky, bold intensity.
Forward-thinking again, the menu comes back with a whole grilled trout with bright vegetables and a tart, lemony beurre blanc; or Centeno’s Plato Vegano, the kind of confident vegan cuisine that doesn’t feel compelled to be something it’s not. Roasted carrots, okra and grilled corn are plied with a chipotle-laced cashew cream and a cilantro sauce enriched with sweet coconut, balanced, bold and full-flavored.
It’s something you’d never have seen on a Southwestern menu 20 years ago. And that’s exactly the point.